As part of my study school week in Aberystwyth we had Dr. Jane Secker, Learning Technology Librarian (such a great job title!) at LSE, as a guest speaker to talk to us about the adventures of LASSIE (Libraries and Social Software in Education). I have been following the LASSIE project with interest since last summer when the initial literature review was published – for those that don’t know the project looked at social (Web 2.0) software such as online reading lists, social bookmarking, blogging and social networking, and specifically how they can be used to support distance learners. During the course of the project however, it became evident that these services can also benefit full-time and part-time students as many choose to study from home.

Jane’s talk was extremely interesting for both people like myself who are familiar with social software, and also with beginners who may not have even heard of the term before the talk. I’ve mentioned before that it surprises me how little Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 are discussed on my course, so it was great to have the talk – there was a lot more talk afterwards and I didn’t feel quite so strange talking about how great Library 2.0 initiatives can be!

I’ve included a copy of Jane’s slides below or you can listen to the talk alongside the slides here.

The LASSIE reports are all available on the project website (they are very practical in nature and make interesting reading). Jane has also published recent articles in both Program and ALISS Quarterly.

Something which I found particularly interesting was how valuable Jane had found the project blog and that although it was set up for the project she still regularly blogs there and finds it very useful – I can certainly relate with that, blogging has become part of my life now and I regularly find myself thinking “Oooh, I’ll write a blog post about that”.

Jane did mention that they were hoping to expand on the original LASSIE project and I certainly hope so, their practical approach to problems faces by academic libraries in the UK I’m sure will be of value to many other institutions.

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On Wednesday I attended a CoFHE event at the Open University in Milton Keynes.

The event was titled “The Terrible 2.0s? Web 2.0 without tears” and covered a variety of Web 2.0 topics such as podcasting, blogging, wikis and social software in general.

The keynote speaker was Peter Godwin, who started the event with a talk on Information Literacy and the Google Generation. Peter’s presentation was very interesting with lots of thought-provoking points made about today’s students (like those made in the CIBER report earlier this year). The main theme emerging from the talk was how today’s students are visual learners who like to learn in small chunks. Like Peter admitted though, doesn’t that describe a lot of us? Definitely something to think about when I’m next preparing material on “boring” (Peter’s words not mine!) topics such as Information Literacy though! He also included one of me favourite YouTube videos, A Vision of Students Today, which it was great to see again. Here it is for anyone that hasn’t yet seen it, really made me think when I first saw it:

I’ve previously written about Peter’s book which he co-edited with Jo Parker, Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0, but just to highlight it again, it really is a very interesting read for anyone involved in teaching information literacy skills.

The next talk was by Jane Knight and Steve Burholt from Oxford Brookes. They shared their experiences of podcasting for libraries from both a librarian and a techy point of view. I found this approach very interesting, it was good to hear about the practical experience for the librarian but was very refreshing to also hear from the techy side. I think it made a lot of us in the room (including myself) realise how much effort is needed to successfully implement a regular podcast for the library. The enthusiasm of the group from Oxford Brookes is certainly to be commended! You can view a copy of the slides for the presentation here.

We then had a break for lunch, which was a great opportunity for networking. I had a number of interesting conversations with other people at the event, mainly discussing new technologies and examples of good practice, as well as the inevitable hurdles people are encountering when trying to implement these new Web 2.0 technologies.

After lunch we had a session on social software by Christian Cooper, a lecturer from Thames Valley University who favours a social constructivist approach to teaching and learning. He discussed educational uses of social software including group critiques (particularly useful for Art and Design students), reflective journals and collaborative learning. The main content of his presentation concentrated on the use of blogging as a tool for learning by encouraging students to use it as a reflective journal of their learning experiences. You can view a copy of the presentation here.

Following a short CoFHE AGM, we then had the opportunity to have a guided tour of the Open University library, and explore the DigiLab, a room within the library for all OU staff and researchers to use to encourage them to explore new technologies and think about how they can apply these technologies to learning.

The DigiLab visit was my personal highlight of the day. Keren Mills, Digital Services Development Officer, gave us a brief introduction to the room and the main purposes of it before taking us to have a look. The room contains different areas of new technologies – it has an area for gaming (including a Wii, Xbox and Playstation2 amongst others), a PC area (for both gaming and advanced software packages), a Mac area (for podcasting, video editing etc.), and a mobile learning area (with PDAs and Smartphones). There are also a number of publications for general interest (I’d be in heaven in there with all the geeky magazines!), as well as copies of reports demonstrating how the technologies can be used (e.g. there was a report on mobile learning and some factsheets for anyone who is new to the area). The room is designed to be a creative space and is very informal in nature, it has comfy chairs and even Lego, plasticine and pipe cleaners to encourage creativity! What I particularly liked about the space was that it is open whenever the library is open and anyone is free to use the facilities whenever they want to. When we first went into the room, there was a group gathered around the Macs and PCs discussing their project on Second Life and it was great to see academics and researchers really embracing the new technologies and thinking about ways to use them to improve learning. The room is still in its infancy and Keren says there are still some concerns from staff that trying these new gadgets is just playing rather than working. I think for the majority of people that have visited the lab though, it is clear that it is an educational space and I hope more academics will take the opportunity to visit it and use the technologies. OU is a pioneer in this sort of thing, but I really hope we see similar schemes being set up in other Universities.

At the end of the day I had a brief tour of the Open University library, which I hadn’t realised had only quite recently been opened for students and the general public (when I say recent, I’m talking years not months, but I’d always naively assumed that all academic libraries were mainly used by students). I was surprised at how relatively small the stock area of the library is, but I hadn’t realised that OU don’t offer a postal lending scheme so the stock they have is only really for academic staff and local students. I can see why they don’t have a postal loan scheme as I’m sure it would be a logistical nightmare, as well as very expensive. Aberystwyth currently offer this for their distance learning students (I’ve never used it though to be perfectly honest!) but then they don’t have anywhere near the student numbers of the OU studying from a distance. It really highlights the importance of schemes such as the SCONUL Access scheme to allow students to borrow or at least use the material at their local libraries, and also the importance of providing access to e-books and e-journals so that OU students can access material from home. The OU Information Helpdesk is in the staff office too, as all their enquiries are taken by phone, e-mail or online chat. It was very interesting to see an academic library which supports a totally different user base to the traditional academic library. I think we were all a little bit envious of not having to deal with group study room bookings and various other annoying things, but I’m sure there are the fair share of problems working with student from such a distance!

All in all it was a very enjoyable day with a good mix of sessions and great networking opportunities. I also happened to meet fellow blogger Clari who works at the Open University, it was nice to meet her in real life.

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I’d heard of FriendFeed before today, but a Lifehacker post I read this morning encouraged me to give it a go.

If you haven’t heard of it before, FriendFeed is basically an aggregator of all your online social networks. It pulls together your updates from blogs, video services like YouTube, social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, picture sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa, wishlists like Amazon wishlist, etc etc! You can see in the screenshot the services is currently covers.

It only took a matter of minutes to register and add my feeds so I now have a nice aggregated feed that will give updates on all my different services.

I can imagine this sort of thing could be very useful for keeping up to date with what people are up to via just an RSS feed, although to be honest I don’t see myself using it very much. FriendFeed encourage you to find your friends on their website but to me that sort of defeats the object, I guess you would only have one website to visit then to see what friends are up to but you might as well add the feeds to your RSS reader (presuming you use RSS feeds).

Having said that, I’m having trouble adding my feed to my Bloglines account. It seems to work fine in Google Reader (I use this as a back-up reader), but Bloglines doesn’t recognise the feed.

Anyway, if you are interested in giving it a go please feel free to subscribe to my feed and let me know in the comments if you have a feed to share or any opinions about the service. I imagine more and more of these aggregators will be appearing to help people control their many online accounts so it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.

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I have two reasons to make this post today:

• This morning I got the go ahead for my “Using Facebook Pages to reach our users” project at work
• The LASSIE project is coming to an end and the reports are available online

I’m really quite proud that my Facebook project is finally properly underway. Now that the Project Proposal has been OK’d with management I can really start progressing it. I have a meeting with my Project Sponsor on Monday morning when we can hopefully plan the way forward. The page is currently live (please feel free to have a look and let me know what you think, all feedback greatly received!) but has not yet been advertised. I’m hoping to improve the page, add new features, and encourage more of our users to join as fans so that we can send them updates about our services and events. I’m not expecting massive numbers of fans but if we can make contact with some students we previously wouldn’t have then I’ll be very happy.

Bizarrely, today was also the day that Jane Secker released the last case study (titled libraries and Facebook!) from the LASSIE project on libraries and social software. I read the early project documentation last year so am looking forward to reading the experiences of their case studies. I’m particularly interested in their reading list case study (as well as the Facebook one obviously!) as I would really like to see our reading lists managed more efficiently and am sure wikis or web services are one of the possible ways we could achieve this. I have 6 hours on the train tomorrow so I’ve printed them all out and am saving them for the train journey!

I’ve got a couple of interesting conferences coming up (one in Southampton tomorrow hence the long train journey!) which include discussions about social software so I’m hoping to share good practice and talk through ideas with other library colleagues there.

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I have been using FireFox as a browser for a while now, and Portable FireFox at work (on my USB stick). I’ve been very happy with FireFox however today have discovered something very similar but with bells and whistles – Flock.

Flock calls itself a social web browser, mainly because it makes use of many of the social networking tools and seamlessly connects them. I am currently writing this blog post in Flock to then add it to my blog.

I’ve already added my Facebook, Flickr, delicious, own blog and work blog accounts and can now easily access any of these from the sidebar within Flock. I can transfer media easily from one to another and also use the “Web Clipboard” to store information for use.

I’m only playing around with it at the moment and unfortunately the portable version is huge so may not fit on my USB drive (yet another reason to buy a new one!), but I’ll definitely be experimenting with it more when I get chance.

I’ve also found a great extension called Screenshot which enables me to take screenshots, save them as jpgs, and upload them to Flickr. I used this to add the Flock screenshot in the blog post.

EDIT: Slight problem with the timestamps, when I edited this post to add in the screenshot it seemed to set the date to 1999.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, browser, web

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Another book related Web 2.0 tool, BookBump lets you keep a record of your books, details of when you read them, what you thought about them, and you can even put in details of where they are and if anyone has borrowed them (I presume this is in case small libraries want to use the software but it’s also handy if you lend books to your friends).

It’s very easy to use, with a similar design to iTunes. Books can be found by ISBN, title, author or keyword search. You can set up different folders and add books to your “Favorites” list. You can also read other people’s reviews about the book, find similar books and check prices. Unfortunately, the price check is only available in USD at the moment.

Another useful feature is the bibliographic feature, which demonstrates how to reference the book in MLA, APA, Chicago, CSE and Harvard style referencing.

I’ve only added a few books as I currently use EndNote to record my course reading and GoodReads for my fiction reading, but it’s definitely something to consider switching to.

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I joined del.icio.us a few weeks ago after having read the chapter in How to Use Web 2.0 in your Library on social bookmarking. I had been meaning to join for a while and finally took the plunge. I’ve been gradually getting used to using it and am spending some time organising my bookmarks more clearly.

As a user of Firefox (and Portable Firefox at work), I have been using the Foxmarks extension for a while now and have found it invaluable. I use the internet in many different places on many different computers; the Foxmarks extension automatically synchronises all your bookmarks and stores a copy on their server in case you lose the ones on your browser. My bookmarks are fairly well organised, however things have got very confused recently, particularly with the huge number of useful Web 2.0 websites and blogs I’ve been bookmarking.

When I joined del.icio.us I had the option to import all my current bookmarks which I did, however I soon found that it had given tags I wouldn’t choose myself. I also don’t see the need to have all my bookmarks on del.icio.us, particularly those which easily fit into the categories I use in my bookmarks (e.g. my banking websites in a Banking folder of my Firefox bookmarks).

After having used del.icio.us for a while, I think it will be best used to keep track of useful links for work, study and the Web 2.0 resources (which seem to be growing in number exponentially recently!). I’m thinking of maybe using it to create feeds for useful links from library blogs (e.g. useful Science related resources for the Applied Sciences blog I will hopefully be creating soon).

I have also tried using Furl to store my bookmarks but I prefer the functionality of del.icio.us (Furl has too many different categories rather than just tagging which I find straight forward), and it also seems more popular so tools, widgets etc. seem to be easy to adapt for your own use.

For anyone who’s interested, here is a link to my del.icio.us bookmarks.

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Thanks to the Infodoodads blog I have been introduced to a great resource this morning.

Omgili is an acronym for Oh My God I Love It, and I think I do. It’s a relatively new resource but something which I think could catch on with added exposure, I know I will find it useful.

Taken from their About section:

Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on “many to many” user generated content platforms, such as, forums, Discussion groups, answer boards and others.

Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions. Most of the questions have already been answered – find the answers through Omgili. Most of the technical problems have been solved – find the solutions through Omgili. Most of the experiences have already been described – find these descriptions through Omgili.

What a great concept! I’ve tried it out and it seems to work really well, it also has a tool to show how popular discussions are in the form of a graph, great for following trends.

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LibraryThing is becoming widely used online, however has limitations on the number of book entries you can make before you have to start paying, and I’ve also found the software to be full of glitches. GoodReads is a similar thing which has been recommended to me. It is totally free with no limitations of book numbers, and you can also set up different shelves (e.g. a “To read” shelf which is essential for me!). I’ll be giving it a go to see if it’s preferable to LibraryThing, although the WAP site for LibraryThing is great when you’re out and about and can’t remember the name of that book you’re after or aren’t sure if you’ve read something before, and I’m not sure if GoodReads has this.

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